The Fair Beauty

Matthijs Maris's 'The Fair Beauty' (1885) is a symbolist figure subject by the most distinctive of the Maris brothers — his increasingly enigmatic images of female figures, half-visible through atmospheric veiling, created a visual world unique in nineteenth-century Dutch painting. The 'fair beauty' subject allowed him to explore the female figure as a symbol of ideal beauty, spiritual transcendence, or the imagination's irrecoverable vision — the figure's partial visibility through the atmospheric ground creating the characteristic Matthijs Maris experience of presence on the edge of dissolution.

Matthijs Maris renders the fair beauty with his characteristic technique of atmospheric dissolution — the figure emerging from or retreating into a soft, heavily worked ground through which forms appear with the quality of vision rather than direct sight. His technical process (involving extensive scraping and reworking of the surface) creates the specific texture of his paintings — a surface that appears to have been struggled with, the image wrested from resistant material rather than applied directly.